Self-hosting and Embracing the Cloud

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Alan Perlis

My self-hosting journey is an odd one. Once upon the time in college, my computer was simultaneously my media center, my workstation, and a server. Self-hosting was how you did it. Back then, I also hosted websites on Pair.com. After my stint as an IT guy, I lost interest in that tinkering so my skills withered for the better part of a decade.

So when I first got this old fashioned blog back online I went with an old reliable host: Dreamhost. They’ve served me well before and made things easy. Simple shared hosting. Dreamhost gives more access than many other shared hosts (e.g., SSH access), but you didn’t have full control of the system. They were far better than some of the hosts I used earlier in this century. Remember iPaska? Yea those guys were terrible.

But that was just how things were done in the early 2000s. They were simpler times where you didn’t have full access. Instead, everyone had their own control panel of some sort, and they made it easy to install common applications like WordPress. Dreamhost was a competent shop and provided a reliable service (unlike iPaska). And although people complained about the speed of the service, I never had a problem. I also didn’t have that much traffic but that’s another issue for another day.

As with all things, times changed. Dreamhost is still here, providing the shared hosting experience. They sell a good service and continue to run it competently. But the big boys (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) now sell you cloud services and also offer free levels for people to use. Sure it isn’t a 12-core processor with gobs of memory, but it is more than enough to host a few web apps. And it isn’t like I get that kind of traffic anyway. All I need is a decently fast system that I can SSH into and have root on. What I would’ve given for this level of access back when I was younger.

The big boys are appealing, but there is a dark horse in the cloud race: Oracle Cloud Free Tier. They give you two AMD compute VMs, and you can get up to Arm Ampere instances, all for free forever. The AMD compute VMs are easier to get, depending on which region you’re interested in your instance living. And they let you use standard Linux distributions including Ubuntu. They’re not a big name in the space, but boy it is hard to argue with two free AMD VMs. It isn’t the fanciest (1 GB memory each) but it is more than enough to handle a few web apps.

With a free system like that online, I’ve spent a little time here and there over the past month to get everything setup. Lately I’ve started using Docker more at home to manage some of the applications hosted on the server. That has helped simplify deployment even though it isn’t as efficient as installing everything on bare metal. But hey the AMD VMs have the resources. WordPress has its official Docker image, so I used one of those variants as my base. The good people at linuxserver.io provided the database, and I tried out a reverse proxy of a more recent vintage with Caddy. The end result is a self-hosted WordPress instance that has a valid SSL certificate that autorenews. Not bad for the price of free, with a little bit of tinkering time over the past few weekends.

Now I’ve expanded on my self-hosted journey. I’ve created a Wallabag instance for my read-it-later service. I don’t commute anymore thanks to remote life, so I don’t have the same amount of idle time every day to read through the day’s articles on Pocket. But I want to guarantee that my articles are always there for me. Even though Pocket is owned by Mozilla now, I wanted to self-host if possible. And Oracle’s AMD VMs are more than enough to meet the task.

Now, not only am I back to self-hosting this blog and some useful tools, I’m back to tinkering. It feels nice after so many years away.

Drinking the M1 Kool-Aid

So I started a new job at the turn of the new year. For the first time, I get the chance to use a Mac as my main daily driver. This is in stark contrast to the entirety of my professional life which has always revolved around some sort of a Windows based system. Even when I was the weirdo running Linux on my laptop, my main system was a Windows system. From Windows 2000, XP, 7, and ultimately 10, it all revolved around Windows.

Suffice it to say, converting to a Mac dominated workflow was pretty different. Granted, for the last 7-8 years, I have had a Mac for personal use, and for occasional light work. So I am certainly familiar with the system. But using it on a daily basis is a very different prospect.

I was fortunate enough to receive one of the new MacBook Air systems with the Apple M1 processor. This is the direct successor to my Intel based MacBook Air that is from the earlier half of the 2010s. The long and the short of it is that the new M1 MacBook Air is absolutely amazing. From the effortless performance to the snappiness of all the applications to the seamless translation of Intel-complied applications using Rosetta 2, it is an amazing system. Although I’m not naive enough to believe that Macs don’t get viruses (e.g., new M1 compatible Mac malware), it certainly is a nice and seamless system. This, combined with a workflow centered around Dropbox Business, is bringing a fresh look to my daily work.

And fortunately, the M1 does not seem to have any of the issues I mentioned in an earlier post about my Dell U3818DW monitor. Except for some minor glitches when the Air wakes up from sleep, the monitor and the laptop play together perfectly using the USB-C cable to charge the laptop, transfer the video signal, and transfer the keyboard and mouse signals. Just one cable to make it all work. Admittedly, it is a slick solution. I sometimes hook in an additional cable (line-out to the integrated amplifier) for audio, but more often than not I simply AirPlay music from the phone or the Music app, or simply stream music from one of several Internet radio stations. Seamless and reliable, the perfect combination.

Unfortunately, we still work primarily in Microsoft Word. A serviceable software package but it would be nice to have iterated on the modern word processor somewhat. Maybe sometime soon there’ll be innovation in this end of the daily work software/hardware stack in the near future.

Rediscovering Internet Radio

Being old enough to have run my computer all night to rip a CD into MP3 format, I remember the genesis of Internet radio. When iwas first released onto the world, now anyone could be a radio host.

And holy shit do a lot of people have terrible music taste.

But this was also the genesis of the live stream. Of the democratization of content. And helped emphasize how sometimes, a curated feed is exactly what we want. Sorta like how Netflix is in fact a paradox of choice.

Similarly, with music, especially if you have a streaming package like Apple Music, you have at your fingertips a library of music that you will likely never be able to finish in its entirety.

But what do you listen to? At least Apple provides some guidance and recommendations. Along with radio shows where someone curates the content for you.

But sometimes, an aimless radio station is exactly what’s needed.

I’m glad to see that SomaFM continues to be a thing. The local NPR station, WAMU, is often streaming as well in the household. But I’m slowly poking around, seeing what is out there still. With a fairly decent sound system sitting with me at my desk now, what better time to rediscover serendipity in music?

For my setup, I’m using my trusty Airplay Express with my NAD C350 integrated amplifier which are driving two Klipsch R-15Ms that I picked up on a whim at Best Buy. Driving audio to this setup, I have forked-daapd running in a docker container (courtesy of the fine people at linuxserver.io). I’ve created a custom playlist that links directly to my favorite streams, including:

Because it is forked-daapd, it works well with the Apple Remote app on the phone and is therefore wife approved. And works well with Apple Music on our individual devices. The Marantz receiver in the living room purportedly supports Airplay as well, and usually performs well. But for reliability, you cannot beat the Airplay Express even though it was released in 2012. With a firmware update from 2018, it supports Airplay 2 and is more than sufficient for my needs for the time being.